Covishield-like vaccine may help fight Nipah virus reveals study
By Lokmat English Desk | Published: September 9, 2021 02:50 PM2021-09-09T14:50:00+5:302021-09-09T14:50:00+5:30
Next 
A Covishield-like vaccine has been found successful in monkey trials against Nipah virus, according to an international team of researchers.
Nipah virus (NiV) is a highly pathogenic and re-emerging virus that causes sporadic but severe infections in humans.
Last week, it claimed the life of a 12-year-old boy in Kerala amid the Covid surge. While all high-risk contacts of the deceased have tested negative, nearby states have been put on high alert for the disease. An outbreak of the virus in the state in 2018 killed 17 of the 18 confirmed with the virus.
Currently, no vaccines against NiV have been approved. Researchers from the University of Oxford, and the US National Institutes of Health investigated the efficacy of ChAdOx1 NiV in the eight African green monkeys.
They published the results on the pre-print server bioRxiv, meaning it is yet to be peer-reviewed.
ChAdOx1 NiV is based on the same vector as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, which has been approved for emergency use in over 60 countries worldwide and administered to 100 million people. While one group of four monkeys were administered either two shots or a single shot of the ChadOx1NiV, the other group were injected with dummy protein (ChAdOx1 GFP), again vectored by ChAdOx1.
